On the mountain, having rolled into the narrow channel, Parl Dro lay until his intelligence went out in pain and blood loss. And after awhile, he bled to death. Unequivocally. Completely. He was dead.
He had come to think, when he lived, that he understood almost all a man could learn of the foibles, motivations, methods and devices of the deadalive. How they were jealous of the living, returned for retribution, sucked energy from those who loved them—particularly kindred—hid their wounds usually from others and themselves, or, very occasionally flaunted those wounds to inspire terror and guilt. That rain did not moisten their garments, which were always those of the hour of their deaths. That they came by night, because the darkness aided in masking the flaws of their physical disguise, but also because their superstition made them chary, unless abnormally strong and self-assured, of the brilliancy of the sun. All those things he had known. They had been helpful. But most of all Tulotef had helped. Not only because it had been his goal on the day he died— Ghyste Mortua, that essential pilgrimage of so many ghost-killers, the ghost town of ghosts who pillaged mortals—but because, along with a motive for return, it had insured that he had previously learned certain disciplines. Believing the thesis that only in the astral form could a man enter the Ghyste safely, Parl Dro had set himself to acquire the skill of trance, and the subsequent psychic release of the spirit body out of his flesh. By the time he died on the mountain, he had been a master of the technique some months. And so the thing occurred which he, with all his understanding of the undead, would never have supposed possible.
A battle began, on some extra-physical plane that had to do with the world and with some other place beyond it. The battle was between the two entities into which Parl Dro had split. One entity was furious to live, to seek Tulotef and destroy it—now an ironical desire indeed. This entity, armed with its psychic disciplines, knew it could reproject itself into the world in a whole and perfect astral form, the most lifelike and undetectable ghost that had ever resisted its death. But the second entity had remained an exorcist, and this entity fought the first, trying to drive it away into that otherworld to which now it rightfully belonged.
If Tulotef had been the only drawing force that called him back into the world of flesh, it was likely Dro the killer of ghosts would have won that ultimate war against his own revenant. But, of course, there was the link, also. An irresistible link. Something that had belonged to him. But better than a bone or a glove, better than a tooth or a hank of shining hair. Much better. Much more enduring.